The State of the Union

Photo by Leah Millis / Reuters

There will be many things written today about January 6, 2021: what lessons we can learn or have failed to learn, what accountability there has been and what may come or never come to those who participated in it or, more importantly, helped organize and fuel it. Given the nature of the existential threat that the insurrection posed, I want to focus today instead on the state of our union generally, and in particular three risks I view as paramount in the struggle to preserve the Republic.

Risk One: Lack of a Shared Reality

If the pandemic and the election of 2020 proved anything, it is that Americans are split not just along partisan lines (which is nothing new) but along factual lines (which feels fairly and distressingly new). The extremes are easy to point out and dismiss; conspiracies about satanic globalist pedophile rings, for example, are more or less an extension of wild, anti-Semitic, child-focused fearmongering that has persisted for hundreds of years. But other factual fractures are widespread and now deeply entrenched as a kind of political identity, from anti-vaxxers to election truthers.

The problem with factual schisms is that we cannot begin to talk about policy like pandemic mandates to voting rights without falling quickly into confusion and paralysis. Even local and state health officials and election officials now share the chilling experience of having their hard work dismissed, their characters maligned, and even their lives and their families threatened, all because many “ordinary” Americans on the right have been radicalized into believing the officials are out to take away their freedoms and nullify their votes.

For years it was Fox News that slowly poisoned the civic well, but the dysfunction went into overdrive when Trump was elected and the lies were supercharged from the White House itself. Social media contributed to the sorting of us into different factual worlds online with their own echo chambers, where “do your own research” amounted to algorithmically-fed, confirmatory disinformation.

While it may be too late to pull right-wing media addicted Americans back into a shared world of truth, there is some hope: Gen Z, which grew up with the Internet as a baseline and somewhat better understands its risks, also watches far less cable news and has a decidedly negative opinion of the current GOP. According to a Pew Research poll, 65 percent of Americans under 29 have an unfavorable view of the former president and just 18 percent watch Fox News regularly. The largest, most dependable GOP voting block is actually the Silent Generation (those over 75), which in the four years between 2020 and 2024 will have shrunk considerably, from 9 percent down to 7 percent of the electorate.

This is a long way of saying that if we can beat back Trump or someone like him for another presidential election cycle, the problem of disinformation and lack of shared reality will begin, albeit morbidly, to resolve itself. What is clear is that we are at an important generational and racial inflection point, which is in part why the civic bonds of the nation are straining and we are hunkered down in completely different realities.

Risk Two: Democratic Cynicism and Complacency

The 2022 midterms that will decide control of the House and, perhaps more importantly, control of the Senate will come down to turnout. Fears that the 2022 map would be even more highly gerrymandered than in the previous decade have thus far failed to materialize, mostly because the GOP elected to protect its incumbents against the demographic shifts it sees coming and had already stacked the deck nearly as far as it could go in many states.

But without Trump himself as a fear-factor on the ticket, Democrats might stay home, particularly if the pandemic persists, inflation continues to run high, or bickering among Democratic factions in the Senate or lack of filibuster reform results in failure for key legislative priorities such as the Build Back Better package or voting rights. Getting Democrats to the polls in a non-presidential year is challenging enough without the added burden of being the party in power that faces daily criticism from the media and the right.

But more than Congress is at stake in this election. Republicans are fielding candidates at the local and state level who are die-hard Trumpists and who, if elected, will do everything they can to ensure that “fraudulent” votes are not cast. This means using their local authority to challenge vote counts and even throw certification of elections into chaos. There is no similar enthusiasm among Democrats to ensure that law-abiding, civic-minded officials are elected to oversee the process. Meanwhile, the other side is rabid about it, living as they do in their unreality.

Before we despair, it’s vital to acknowledge that the answer to Democratic cynicism and complacency has already been roadmapped for us. Stacey Abrams showed how to turn defeat in Georgia in 2018 (under circumstances where voter suppression was widespread) into victory in 2020, delivering Georgia’s electoral college votes to Biden and two Senate seats to cement a Democratic majority there. And in an off-year election cycle in 2021, Democrats actually netted 30 new seats in municipal elections across her state by simple, effective grassroots organizing. 

There is other reason to hope, even if a federal voting rights bill cannot emerge. Even as 19 GOP-controlled red states moved to restrict voting rights, blue states moved to expand it. For example, California became a universal vote-by-mail state where ballots must be sent to all registered voters in advance of elections. This could have a tremendous impact on close House races in newly redrawn districts in Southern California and, with between seven and ten actually competitive seats, provide the margin of victory to keep Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker. Motivating voters to mail back their ballots is far simpler than getting them out of their houses and to their local precinct offices. The work is different, but the dry run on the failed effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom proved that it could be achieved even in an off-cycle. 

Risk Three: Failure of Justice

On this January 6th anniversary I would be remiss if I didn’t add my voice to the concern many historians and political observers share: A failure to hold those responsible for the insurrection will lead to further coup attempts. Whether January 6 was the beginning of the end of Trumpism, or merely the first of what will become regular efforts to overthrow our system, now lies in the hands of two bodies, the January 6 House Select Committee and the Justice Department.

Both have been saying the right things lately. The Committee has indicated that it wants to hold public hearings, perhaps even in prime time, that will air in detail what led up to the attack on the Capitol and what actually happened on that day. The Committee also stated that they are considering including criminal referrals in their final report, and Committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney specifically called out former President Trump on the possibility he corruptly obstructed a Congressional proceeding, whether by action or inaction—an explosive charge that quoted a criminal statute carrying up to a 20-year prison sentence.

Yesterday, in a much-anticipated speech, Attorney General Merrick Garland emphasized, “The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators at any level accountable under law, whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy” and that the “actions we have taken thus far will not be our last.” Many took heart in his words, seeing them as a signal he will follow the trail upwards as high as it takes him.

But time is running out for the Committee to complete its work, and some of the key parts of its investigation, particularly those related to presidential records, remain in limbo while the matter is litigated, now up to the Supreme Court. Many also wonder whether Garland has the mettle to file charges against the former president, given how many other instances of obstruction, fraud, and election tampering already have been unearthed without visible movement from the Justice Department.

The American people won’t have a great deal of say over whether Trump and his allies are ever charged with crimes relating to the 2020 election or January 6, so there is not much we can do but watch and remain engaged as events unfold. I continue to believe that justice in some form is coming for the former president, but in what form and when remains unclear. If charges do come this year, the election will certainly take on a wholly different tone, and the stakes will have been raised considerably higher not just for the criminal defendants but for America as a whole. 

If 2021 was a year for rebuilding what we had lost during the prior four years, 2022 could be a year for reckoning for those who perpetrated the Big Lie and tried illegally to hold on to power. Here’s hoping that it shall be so.